Fitbit – companion app for popular wearable fitness trackers

Fitbit is an activity tracker that keeps tabs on steps, distance, calories burned and sleeping habits. These features are tracked by various wearable activity tracking devices such as the Fitbit Flex, One or Zip. The latter is a quarter sized device I have and used for this review, let’s explore more!

Food and water tracker needs a lot of work requires tedious manual input.

App sync only available to a dozen devices, however, there is computer sync with USB dongle.

Features:

Fitbit is one of the leading wearable fitness tech products with a range of gadgets like the Flex, a wireless activity & sleep tracker with wristband; the Zip, a tiny clip-on activity tracker; the One, a hybrid of the Flex and Zip whereas it clips on and tracks sleep habits too and then there’s the Aria, a wireless digital scale.

All these sync wirelessly via Bluetooth (with the exception of the scale, that’s over WiFi) to the Fitbit app available on Android & iOS and to their website. I have the Zip, you can learn more about that product review here, but the main difference in this product versus the other wearables is that it doesn’t track sleep habits via the app. It does track steps taken, calories burned and distance achieved. Plus you can add friends for some healthy competition granted they have a device. If you’re near a goal, you receive a notifications to encourage to go and achieve it. Plus there are badges you can earn. Lastly, it can track food and water intake but these are the less desirable areas of the app as you have to manually input these. At least water intake offers a slider, however, entering food is a very tedious task of entering each individual ingredient in your meal. Check out how I had to enter a Chipotle burrito… yeah… you immediately stop using those features if it’s not automatic like the pedometer tracking- which is pretty accurate tracking.

Fitbit Online Dasboard

The online dashboard, of course, offers more robust data, charts and input options. The free product shows your data but not what to do with it to increase results. The company does have such solutions called Fitbit Trainer which is a premium membership for $49.99/year that promises more assessment of your data to help you become more fit.

Overall the app connection to the device is decent with the exception of a few periodic connectivity issues. Tip: an issue that was totally my fault, but if you’re like me and don’t care for jumping into product manuals then maybe you should for this product. As you should setup the pedometer to sync with the app right away else you risk losing data. When I first got the device I immediately wore it for nearly a week before installing and syncing the app, thus I lost all of the prior data and had to start fresh.

Fitbit – Dashboard

Fitbit – Dashboard 2

Fitbit – Food and Water

Fitbit – Charts

Fitbit – Weight Chart

Fitbit – Find Friends

Fitbit – Food and Water

Fitbit – Search for Individual Food Items

Fitbit – Tedious Manual Food Enter

Fitbit – Settings

Fitbit – Water Intake

Usefulness:

If you have a Fitbit product, then this app is required to sync and track activity.

Ease of Use:

The app is very easy to use if just operating as a pedometer- almost hands-free in that respect. If entering water and especially food, it becomes work.

Frequently Used:

Hopefully daily. Long as you have a Fitbit device on you it will automatically sync data and the phone syncs to the cloud.

Interface:

The user interface is really slick, bright and modern. All filled with easy to read and understand stats and graphs.

AndroidTapp.com Rating

(4.0 out of 5)

Should you Download Fitbit? For any Fitbit product owner the companion app is a must-have. This one-two combo is how data is synced between the phone and the cloud. There could be significant improvements in the food and water modules, overall it’s a good automatic pedometer app for tracking fitness.